Closer and closer to 500 miles. I slept well last night. It was cool but not cold and with no chance of rain in the forecast, I didn’t put up my tarp so when I did wake up briefly through the night, I did a bit of star gazing. I was up a little after 6, retrieved the food bags and made coffee. We packed up and left camp a little after 8.
It was under 7 miles back to Damascus. 3 miles in I crossed the border out of Tennessee into Virginia. I have now completed the AT in three states – Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee! A few other hikers that stayed in the shelter we got water at passed us as we went down the hill and we heard about their bear visitor. He’d rattled some of the cables on the bear hangs and then chewed on an ursack for a bit before moving on. We rolled into town a bit after 12 and it took a minute to get our bearings. We quickly learned we’d racked up a lot of miles of the AT already just walking around for trail days 😝.
Absent all the hikers, it seemed like a ghost town. We didn’t see more than 5 people as we walked on Main Street and headed to the diner for lunch. The diner was different too – we got right in with no wait and it seemed they’d cut the number of tables by 50%. Town food consumed, we headed to the outfitters for Katie to make some adjustments to her kit to try to get some better sleep and be more comfortable the rest of the way and so I could get a trail days t-shirt (tie die of course!). Then it was back to the parking lot and our cars to do a final gear swap out and resupply. We also cameled up on water at the pool restrooms since we weren’t sure how far we were going and if there would be water at our camp.
We headed back toward the woods around 2…but got distracted by Dairy King being open. A cone and a shake later, we resumed the road walk to get us back in the woods around 3. There are lots of campsites right out of Damascus, but not many with easy access to water. We reached a few, evaluated them and decided to keep moving, eventually stopping where we stayed around 6:30 since it was close to Laurel Creek.
We setup camp, retrieved (and drank – it was pretty hot this afternoon) some water, made dinner and chatted before turning in at hiker midnight (9 PM). Tomorrow is a slightly more than 10 mile hike to a shelter so should be an easy day so long as the weather cooperates which it seems like it will.
Leave a Reply